Democracy Died in December

Yann van Heurck, Guilford Peace Alliance, JVP

In December the Israeli Knesset voted against equality for all its people in violation of Israel’s own Declaration of Independence. Christians, Druze and Muslims officially don’t have equal rights to Jews. Plans are underway to expel 36,000 Palestinians from the Negev and formally annex the West Bank.

In September the Israeli government, in an official letter to the Supreme Court, said that Israel could ignore international law anywhere in the world, violate the sovereignty of foreign countries, and disregard international law in any field it desires. Israel forcibly seized nearly 80% of Palestine in 1948 after being given 55% in the 1947 UN partition, and in 1967 took the whole country and started settling colonists there in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The myth of Israeli democracy is dead.

Many PAR readers attended last October’s Tree of Life program at Shoreline Unitarian church in Madison highlighting HR 4391, the US bill to stop US funding for Israel’s illegal detention and torture of Palestinian children (over 500 of whom died in last summer’s Israeli attacks on Gaza). Tree of Life and Jewish Voice for Peace ask people to sign ToL’s petition to support this bill in the new Congress at tolef.org. The bill does not affect US military aid to Israel.